Can Leopards benefit from some Sooner advice?

I think I found the answer to Lafayette football’s offensive problems.

Or, I found AN answer worth trying. And, it comes via another collegiate head coach who has no offensive coordinator.

I have been saying Lafayette Coach John Garrett needs to hire an offensive coordinator and actually give him charge over the Leopards’ attack, which produced an average of just 13 points per game in 2018 and 12 ppg in 2017.  

Lafayette won three games in ’17 and scored a grand total of 31 points in the three games combined. The Leopards got a lot better in winning in 2018, scoring 81 points in their three wins. But they also had five games in which they scored six points or less.

The one statistic that stuck out above – or below – all others was that Lafayette scored only four touchdowns on pass plays in 2018. Eleven games, four passing TDs. Only one other team in all the FCS had fewer TD passes (Jacksonville with three), and that team threw just 63 passes all year. Lafayette threw 361. It was horrible.

Lafayette fans far and wide – with the exception of Beverly Hills, Calif., the home of Lafayette’s starting quarterback the last two years, Sean O’Malley – are calling for a new guy under center, or taking those direct snaps. But coming out of spring practice, it appears O’Malley is still the favorite to start at William & Mary on Aug. 31.

I’ve thought a lot about what Garrett, who likes being his own offensive coordinator and has finally not even named an OC for 2019, might do to jack up the offense. Garrett has OC in his resume, but he has been anything but dynamic as a play caller for two years.

So, earlier today I was looking at Twitter and I came across a feed that was retweeted by John Loose, the former Lafayette defensive coordinator who is now an assistant at Army West Point. The thing is the tweet had nothing to do with defense. It was all about offense, and I listened to it – all 59 seconds of it – six times in a row because it may be just what Lafayette needs to do.

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The coach delivering the message is Lincoln Riley, the head coach at Oklahoma University. In January, Riley, following two years in which the Sooners were 24-4, signed a new five-year, $32.5-million contract. 

Oklahoma was an offensive powerhouse. Riley is making millions. His most recent QB, Baker Mayfield, won the Heisman Trophy. 

And, Riley operates without an offensive coordinator. Surely, Coach Garrett can relate to him.

He has a very interesting thought about offense, and it’s my word for Lafayette’s Garrett.

DUMP 7-ON-7 PRACTICE PERIODS.

What? The 7-on-7 is the favorite of many coaches, Garrett being high the list. Last week, in part because of small numbers but also because it’s the way he likes to operate, Garrett used more 7-on-7 than anything else during the Leopards’ spring game.

Here’s what Riley had to say.

“For me, like, I get sick of 7-on-7. Like, 7-on-7 drives me crazy. To me, we used to, back in the day at Texas Tech, we would do 7-on-7 for 40-45 minutes straight, and now at Oklahoma we probably do 7-on-7 5-6 minutes a day, and that’s it. And we don’t even do it every day because to me, in the game, this day and age, with all the play action and all the movements, quarterbacks moving around, RPO’s, all that good stuff,  to me, 7-on-7, there’s a place for it, but I don’t know that it really applies. And to me, sometimes it can teach some bad habits, too, especially from the quarterback position, S0, back in our drills, we said, alright, we’re going to revamp our drills, and we made everything movement-based and trying to make the quarterback uncomfortable, the thought process being these guys get enough comfortable throws, just standing there in the pocket, 7-on-7, no rush, this and that, they get plenty of that."

The words “teach some bad habits … from the quarterback position” hit me harder than a Malik Hamm sack. Images of QBs dropping back and scanning the field without fear of being slammed, taking longer than they’d ever have to throw under “live” conditions against first-team defenses, danced through my head.

And then I remembered how often last Saturday, passes in 7-on-7 were incomplete, which seems almost inconceivable, I thought: Maybe what O’Malley, Troy Fisher, Cole Northrup and Reed Aichholz really need is to be moving round more.

Be, as Riley put it, “uncomfortable.” Hit receivers on the run. If the receivers don’t come open, take off and get some yards on your own. And maybe, just maybe, force a defensive player to worry about you and free up your receiver for big yards down the field. I've seen lots of opponents do exactly that to Lafayette's secondary with big results. 

That sent me back to the Lafayette Roster. Consider, Fisher passed for 4,329 yards and 44 touchdowns and ran for 1,513 yards And 32 touchdowns in high school; Northrup threw for more than 7,000 yards and 72 TDs; O’Malley passed for 4,199 and 32 TDs and ran for 540 yards and 11 TDs; and Aichholz passed for 4,055 yards and 37 TDs and ran for 1,378 yards and 39 TDs. 

I also remembered former Lafayette Coach Frank Tavani telling me Northrup reminded him of ex-Leopard QB Brad Maurer, who led the team to league championships with his arm and his legs. He threw for 5,114 yards and 28 TDs and ran for 1,209 and 14 TDs as Lafayette won or shared titles in 2004-6.

Maybe they’ve felt a bit confined by an offense that is based more on dropping back and trying to read the defense’s every nuance. Those quarterbacks achieved much success during their high school careers; but suddenly, they are mired in offensive pothole that has swallowed them up.

Who on the Lafayette Sports Fan Forum or in the stands at Fisher hoping for something different, would not applaud a bold move like putting aside the pro-style offense of the first two years of the Garrett era and replacing it with a wide-open, go from broke once in a while, style. Is Garrett capable of it? Which of the quarterbacks would suddenly bloom?  Is anyone capable of it?  Is it worth a try? 

Read those Riley comments again. Or, go to Twitter and search for the video that grabbed me. Then get back to the drawing board. It’s not too late. The players might love it, too.